pcplantdb

[Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Howdy all,

Don't worry, I'm still around. :-)
A couple of things on the front-end (web) front...
Chad, would it be possible to wrap the plant descriptions in a few more 
tags? It would be nice to be able to format it a bit more. I suppose I 
should write a mockup for you. For the results something like:
<div id="results">
<div id="found">Found 1020 matches for 'food'</div>
<ul class="plant">
<li class="family"><a 
href="/cgi-bin/eden?family=Compositae">Compositae</a></li>
<li class="binomial"><a href="/cgi-bin/eden?plant=6731">Taraxacum 
officinale </a></li>
<li class="common">Dandelion</li>
<li class="description">
<p>Description:  A deciduous perennial that grows to 1.0 meters (3.3 
feet) high by 0.5 meters (1.65 feet) [snip]</p>
</li>
</ul>
<ul class="plant">
....
</ul>
</div>

It would really allow a lot more flexibility on how things get 
displayed.
Something similar for the plant description. As Richard mentioned, 
maybe when we're up to it, output as XML, and run it through XSLT to 
get the markup above.

Also, on tags like the plant uses, should we perhaps use a 
(tooltip-like) popup to hold the description, instead of a link to a 
new page? There are some pure CSS methods, and a few javascript methods 
as well to accomplish this. Could we also use anchors for the 
references [13]? Maybe there's a regex-pression that can find brackets 
(find left bracket, replace with [<a href="#, add [0-9] up to right 
bracket, add ">", add [0-9] up to right bracket, replace right bracket 
with </a>] )...thats using 2 instances of the text between the 
brackets, not sure if regex can do that...
I'm assuming we need that because the references are part of a SQL text 
field, and not dynamically generated.

In other news, I've looked at TouchGraph some more, and it does look 
very nice. I'm not a Java programmer, I've tried to import the source 
into Apple's Project Builder, but I can't seem to get the directory 
structure set up right to compile. Java seems readable, and I _may_ be 
able to tweak things well enough to be useful, if I can get this thing 
set up correctly. I wonder what relationship data we can draw from the 
database as it's currently set up.

Lastly, I got a response from ibiblio, they say I should log in using 
"pyg" and "change2me", doesn't seem quite right...

Cheers from the rainy coast,
Bear